July 13, 2004

Negation by Association

Since I just 'fessed
up to being a could care less speaker, I'm happy to learn from
reader Lisa Davidson that Senator John Kerry came out as one too, in his 60
Minutes interview on Sunday:

Is the Democratic presidential candidate worried about being upstaged by
his running mate?

"I could care less," says Kerry. "Look,
this is about issues. It's about Americans; it's about problems. If he does
a great job of going out, which I know he will, this is why I chose him -
because I wanted the best person and I think he's the best."

Lisa added:

I saw this interview tonight (in fact, I have it on tape), and he
definitely wasn't being sarcastic or ironic. He just used the wrong phrase.

Excuse me? The wrong phrase? Us carelessians believe that there are times when
no other phrase will do.

Just to keep our coverage fair and balanced, I need to point out that President
George W. Bush is also a could care less speaker:

(link)
I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, or could
care less about political party, you have an obligation to America.

John Kerry and George W. Bush are a bit older than I am, but none of us is a
teenager. And I don't think any of us is being sarcastic when we say that we could care less.

Continuing my search through the LDC's archives of conversational speech transcripts,
I've started to get a glimmer of what's really going on here. Consider these
examples:

... they were just most of them -- were really just looking for money, and
you know they didn't care less about the person
...
... a rocket up on Mars? I don't know about you, but I know -- why would I
want to live up on Mars? Why would I -- uh why would
I care less?

For many people, I think that "care less" has come to be an emphatic
form of care, with a tinge of polarity about it -- something like "give
a damn". Google finds plenty of other evidence:

(link) He was not
a show cat, but I didn't care less about it.
(link)
Who will win!? Do you care less?!
(link)
What on earth was going on, and why should I care less
anyway?

And in other cases, it seems that care less has just come to
mean "not care", incorporating the negative even without a could
around:

(link)
Marcus Wilkins a player with ability but a player who cares less and just
wants the paycheck..
(link) Michelle
lives in an apartment who can barely afford to pay rent, who also lives with
a druggie room mate who cares less about her, and her boyfriend abuses Michelle
and she's afraid to break up with him.
(link)
The same as my wife (an artist who cares less about motorcars and the
like) can start her car and drive around happily, everybody could be
able to install Amaya (or any other program) without worrying about the
PC internals.

And it looks like John Lawler has picked
up on this, some time ago. He calls it "negation by association":

Like could care less, give a damn
is a Negative
Polarity Item, that is, a phrase that is ordinarily used only within the
scope of semantic negation of some kind (not, never, only, rarely, few, etc.).
Hence the perceived strangeness of They could give a damn, which
has no overt negative, but means the same thing as the same phrase with a
negative. I.e, the business manager was saying that his members couldn't give
a damn.

Give a damn is a member of the open Minimal
Direct Object class of NPI's, like lift a finger, drink a drop, do
a thing, eat a bite, etc. The implication of all of them is that, if
one can't even Verb a Minimal Direct Object,
why, then, one couldn't Verb any Direct Object
at all. Thus it's an idiomatic intensification of a negative. But it does
usually require a negative to intensify.

However, there apparently is such a thing as negation
by association. Like what happened to French pas from ne...pas,
which is now usable as a negative in its own right, from long association
in the discontinuous morpheme with the overt negative ne, give
a damn and could care less have, in American usage at least,
come to have their own quasi-independent negative force.

Give a damn has been used independently of
negatives for at least 25 years in America. I published a paper (J. Lawler,
Ample Negatives, in Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting, Chicago
Linguistic Society (CLS 10)) in 1974 that remarked on this topic, among other
negative phenomena.

This makes a lot more sense than Pinker's sarcastic
teenage intonation theory. Which I will still test empirically, because
the intonation part is fun, even if at this point you could care less about
care less.

[Update: David Beaver wrote to point out that the alt.usage.english FAQ has an
entry
for could care less, just in case you could still care for more, ]

"I (could) couldn't care less" in Spanish is "no me importa un comino" OR "Me importa un comino." Both seem eminently logical to me. "It makes no more difference to me than a cumin seed," or "It makes as much difference to me as a cumin seed." Possibly something like this is going on in English. I can see someone saying "He gives a damn about his workers" to mean "He doesn't give a damn about his workers." That would confirm your analysis.

The Spanish case is similar, in that it's another example of what John Lawler called "minimal direct object" intensification of negation. It's a bit different, in that the literal meanings of the positive version ("it matters (only) a cumin seed") and the negative version ("it doesn't matter (even) a cumin seed") are not pragmatically very far away from one another.

The "give a damn" case is tricky, since one common colloquial generalization is that it's a positive intensive form -- as in the public service ad campaign of that name -- rather than generalization via "negation by association", as in Jonathan's example. I do agree with Jonathan that I sometimes hear "he gives a damn about ..." used to mean "he doesn't give a damn about...", though I can't locate any examples. And there's no question that "could give a damn" is used to mean "doesn't care at all".

As John Lawler pointed out, the traditional poster child for "negation by assocation" is French "ne...pas", where the historical sequence is (spelling aside)
"je ne sais", "je ne sais pas", "je sais pas", all as ways to say "I don't know". Literally, "I not know", "I not know (a) step", "I know (a) step". Not that "pas" has meant "step" in this construction for quite a few centuries. ]